On Reading Portfolio: An Effective Way To Improve Students' Extensive Reading Ability

As the objectives in the new English Curriculum Standards (ECS) include comprehensive strategies, attitudes and culture etc, the traditional quantity-based summative assessment becomes powerless in testing students' language competence and evaluating non-cognitive factors on language learning. Portfolio, initially introduced as a way for artists, graphic designers and other such professionals to show evidence of their works and illustrate their skill at applying knowledge to practice, is now adopted in educational field. It is constituted as an interface between learning and evaluation, and is developed as a tool to collect systematic information so that students and teachers can organize, manage, and analyze life inside and out of school. Besides, portfolio assessment helps achieve English instructional goals, students' overall development and their sustained development. To make a research on establishing reading portfolio on reading teaching in senior school, this paper reviews the problems of assessment in China, points out the status of portfolio assessment in China, gives a brief introduction to portfolio and portfolio assessment, and illustrates the strategies in implementing portfolio assessment as well as the procedures of implementation. In addition, the paper focuses on the experiment on reading portfolio to promote students' reading ability and writing ability, and points out that portfolio assessment has its inherent weaknesses that can be rectified in the course of practice. Hence, more efforts should be devoted to this research and skills like writing, speaking, listening should be covered in the near future. After analyzing the research design, method, results of the experiment, the author believes that reading portfolio is an effective way to improve students' extensive reading ability, and it has a prosperous future.